LearnVest (for iPhone)

Personal finance service LearnVest's excellent app monitors your money automatically. It doesn't include bill pay reminders or your credit score, but LearnVest can put you in touch with a personal financial planner, for a fee.

The best personal finance mobile apps help you stay connected to your money, even when you're far from your bank or your credit card statement. Personal finance website LearnVest does it with a mobile app that's easy to use and includes relevant features. No matter where you are, you can peek in on the balances in all your accounts, get details of every item in every charge, create a record of cash that you've spent, and check whether you're within your monthly budget in whatever categories you set. LearnVest's iPhone app (there's an Android app, too) does a fine job with personal finance. It's similar to Mint.com's mobile app, but not as comprehensive. Mint includes bill reminders and a credit score, two features you won't find in LearnVest. Mint remains our Editors' Choice.

Price and Plans Many personal financial apps are free to download and use, and LearnVest for iPhone is no exception. You can install the app and sign up for an account with nothing more than an email address and password.

It's free to use LearnVest to track your transactions, create budgets, and set financial goals. LearnVest does give you the option to get in touch with a certified financial planner for an extra cost. You have to pay a $299 setup charge, plus a $19-per-month fee for this service.

For that price, however, you get a financial planner with whom you can discuss the nitty-gritty details of your financial matters. The financial planner also helps create your online LearnVest profile. LearnVest says that its financial planners do not manage assets, place trades, or make specific investment recommendations, although they do work with you to determine strategies for growing and saving your money based on your goals. I did not test these services.

Paying members also get a few perks on the website itself, such as access to articles, classes, and online events for learning more about personal finance. Every paying member also gets a document summarizing his or her financial situation. See this sample LearnVest Program document for details.

Mint is entirely free to use, with no up-sells. Mint makes money by showing you targeted advertising. Because Mint knows what kind of interest rates and fees are associated with all your financial accounts, it can show you ads for accounts that will save you money or help you earn more money. Mint even compares how much you'll save or earn over time with different accounts so that you have personalized information before applying for a new credit card, savings account, or loan.

Setting Up LearnVest

The LearnVest app is easy to use largely because it connects directly to all your (US-only) accounts, such as savings, checking, credit cards, and investment accounts. It then pulls information from these accounts into one place to give you a comprehensive view of your money. LearnVest works with US financial institutions only, and it supports a wide range of banks. It does not support Venmo or PayPal. Mint works with accounts in the US and Canada, and it also supports Venmo, PayPal, and even Bitcoin.

As with Mint, LearnVest asks you for your username and password for your financial accounts. From LearnVest, you cannot do anything with your accounts other than see information. So neither you nor a hacker who broke into your LearnVest account could move money from LearnVest. It uses bank-level encryption, and is secured by VeriSign and scanned by McAfee Secure daily. LearnVest's security information explains in a little more detail how it works to keep your information secure.

If you're hyper concious of security and don't want to give a personal finance app access to your accounts, there are alternatives, such as Dollarbird and Checkbook that rely instead on manual entry. Manually entering financial data is less convenient, more time consuming, and more prone to error. But if you really want a personal finance app that's totally disconnected from your actual bank accounts, they do exist.

When you download and install LearnVest on your iPhone, the app walks you through a quick setup process. This could take anywhere from two to 15 minutes, depending on how many financial accounts you have and how much customization you want.

Early in the process, LearnVest tells you to create a passcode, which is a good thing. Even though none of your bank account information is stored in the app, you should always protect information regarding your net worth, spending habits, and related information. Putting a passcode at the app level gives you one more layer of security.

Like Mint, LearnVest finds all your transactions and account balances, both current and historical, up to three months back. It uses this information to develop a picture of your net worth as well as insights into where you typically spend your money.

Also similar to Mint, LearnVest automatically classifies the transactions into categories (called folders in the app) such as Groceries, Bills, Restaurants and Bars, Personal Care, and so forth. If it can't make a good guess as to the correct folder for the expense or income, it marks it Unclassified. You then have the opportunity to go through the list, item by item, and classify them all correctly. If you can't find the right folder, you can create a new folder for the type of transaction.

Unfortunately, LearnVest isn't very smart when it comes to classifying expenses. If I correct an expense made at Parrot Coffee from Restaurant to Groceries, I want LearnVest to offer to make the same change to all other transactions from the same establishment. Or, if LearnVest sees $800 incoming on the same day every month that it wrongly classifies as Paycheck, and I correct it to Transfer, I want it to learn to correctly classify it as such in the future. In the Mint Web app (but not the mobile app), if the classification is wrong, you can fix it and in the process create a rule that reassigns the correct classification to all other transactions matching the one you've just fixed.

Digging In

As you dig into your spending and earnings in LearnVest, you can see charts and graphs showing how much money you spend in different categories and what percent of your total spending any given category comprises. LearnVest lays out all this information in formats that are easy to read.

From the passcode lock screen, you can add a cash transaction, a convenience for mobile users that I haven't see in other apps. I also appreciate that LearnVest has added the ability to hide a transaction from your finances, which is necessary when you have some unusual financial activity that you don't want to count across your typical budgets and assessments.

Speaking of budgets, LearnVest lets you create budgets in different spending categories, such as giving yourself a $500 monthly limit on groceries or a $35 limit on coffee shop purchases. From the LearnVest iPhone app, you get quick and simple insight into where you stand with each of your budgets.

When you create a new budget, LearnVest looks at your transaction history to suggest the average amount you spend in each category. For example, I created a budget for Home spending, and LearnVest told me that on average I spend $53 per month on Home purchases. Below that suggestion is a list of recent transactions that would count. I like that LearnVest also tells you upfront whether you're within budget so far for the current month before you agree to the limit.

Mint's mobile budgeting feature works similarly. It also analyzes your spending pattern to suggest an average monthly amount that is likely appropriate, or at least in line with your past behavior.

Mint's mobile app does have one feature that isn't in LearnVest's mobile app, and that's the ability to split transactions. Say I charge $20 to my local coffee shop. If only $3.50 was for a drink and the rest was for coffee beans, I might want to classify $16.50 under Groceries rather than Coffee Shops. In Mint, I can do that in the mobile app, but to do it in LearnVest, I need to use the Web app. At least it's doable, but as people perform more and more of their computing on their mobile devices, it's increasingly important to be able to do it all via apps, without requiring recourse to the website.

Financial goals are important, and I like seeing them in a mobile app, where they are visible whenever you look at the state of your finances. A goal might be to save a certain amount of money, pay off credit card debt, earn a set amount of interest income, or pay down a loan.

I created a goal of saving $50,000 into an IRA account, and I was a little confused by LearnVest's calculation. It first asked me to select an account, which I did. The balance in that account is about half of my goal. Then LearnVest asked how much I could put toward my goal each month. I told it $200, and LearnVest said it would take me about 11 years to reach my goal. If I'm not mistaken, the goal did not take into account my interest rate or compounding interest. Then I saved the goal and re-opened it to take another look. The 11-year estimated had turned into 10 years. That's confusing.

Mint's goals tell you the date you will reach your goal, and whether you're on target, ahead, or behind, and by how much. For certain kinds of goals, such as retirement, Mint gives you incredible detail, too. You tell Mint at what age you want to retire and what kind of income you want to have then (in today's dollars). Mint then tells you the assumed rate of inflation, average age of death, and lets you choose how aggressively you want to invest your money. The app then tells you how much you need to sock away every month to make it happen. That's much better than the guesswork that LearnVest makes you do. However, Mint's goals are on visible in the Web app. You can't see them in the iPhone app, the way you can with LearnVest.

LearnVest doesn't have bill reminders or your credit score, whereas Mint does. What LearnVest does have is useful educational articles about the basic principles of personal finance. The app contains a reading section where you can brush up on all your economic interests. You might read about how to get started investing, for example, or how to get out of credit card debt.

Mobile Money Management

LearnVest's mobile app is the first real competitor to Mint I've seen. It is very similar in what it does and how it works, though it doesn't quite nudge Mint from its Editors' Choice perch. Mint has a few key features that LearnVest doesn't, and it's a bit more sophisticated with goals, although they are only available in the Mint Web app. LearnVest is still an excellent personal finance and budgeting app, with a great design, an intuitive interface, and helpful reading material. If you're willing to pay, the service will even hook you up with a financial planner. If you don't like Mint, LearnVest is a fine alternative.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio